A cross-chain access control mechanism based on blockchain and the threshold Paillier cryptosystem

Abstract

With the continuous maturation of blockchain technology and the increasing demands for various industry applications, data sharing and interoperability among different blockchain networks face significant challenges. Research on cross-chain interoperability mechanisms has facilitated data collaboration across organizations and industries, enhancing the value and utility of data. When engaging in cross-chain data interactions, access control ensures the security and privacy of data while promoting collaboration and information exchange among multiple chains. Attribute-based access control can provide fine-grained authorization support, matching complex business scenarios. However, publicly disclosed policies and attributes in a transparent blockchain network may pose privacy and security issues. To address these issues, this paper proposes a cross-heterogeneous multichain data access control scheme based on attributes and threshold homomorphic encryption, achieving fine-grained and secure cross-domain access control in cross-chain networks. This scheme uses the threshold Paillier cryptosystem to encrypt and conceal user attributes and access policies. Through smart contracts, homomorphic differential computation is performed on the ciphertext of policies and attributes, to protect data privacy. This solution leverages private key decryption shares from multiple relay nodes in the cross-chain network to jointly decrypt the computation results, providing secure access control in complex cross-chain scenarios. Security analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme ensures security with reasonable computational overhead, to meet the access control requirements in cross-chain networks.